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1-7 of 7
- Marion Michael was born as Marion Ilonka Michaela Delonge in Königsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1940. Her father was a doctor. The last months of the war she spent together with her mother and her four-year older brother on Hiddensee, a small island in the Baltic Sea. After the war, the family moved to Berlin where Marion attended a secondary school. As a ten-year-old, she made her stage debut in little theatre and was taught classical dance in the ballet school of Tatjana Gsovsky. When she was only 15, she was selected out of allegedly 12,000 entries for the lead in Liane, das Mädchen aus dem Urwald/Liane, Jungle Goddess (Eduard von Borsody, 1956). This adventure film was largely shot on location in Africa.
The story is about a girl who is discovered in the African jungle by an expedition group which includes Hardy Krüger. A tribe adores her as a goddess. It turns out that she is Liane, the long lost granddaughter of a rich shipowner in Hamburg. Her dark hair was dyed blonde and she was promoted as the 'German Brigitte Bardot'. Michael appeared topless during the first half of the film and this was part of the success of the film. However, she was acceptable for family audiences as the nature child with no obvious erotic suggestiveness.
The film was a huge box office hit, and producer Gero Wecker offered her a seven-year-contract. The press loved her, she was constantly photographed, and at the age of 18 she already owned a sports car. Unfortunately this success of her debut film would not be matched by any of her later films.
Marion Michael played next in the comedy Der tolle Bomberg/The Mad Bomberg (Rolf Thiele, 1957) opposite Hans Albers, an adaptation of the 1923 novel of the same title by Josef Winckler based on a real historical Westphalian aristocrat of the nineteenth century.
Then followed the sequel Liane, die weiße Sklavin/Jungle Girl and the Slaver (Hermann Leitner, 1957), this time opposite Adrian Hoven. Set in North Africa, this story concerns Arab slave traders who abduct Liane and members of her tribe. Later, the two Liane films were edited together and re-marketed as Liane - die Tochter des Dschungels/Liane - The Daughter of the Jungle.
In order to break away from the Liane image, Marion took dance and acting lessons and then appeared opposite Christian Wolff in Es war die erste Liebe/First Love (Fritz Stapenhorst, 1958) in which a Catholic theology student falls in love with a country girl. Tragedy came about when, during the shooting of the crime film Bomben auf Monte Carlo/Bombs on Monte Carlo (Georg Jacoby, 1960) with Eddie Constantine, she had a car accident that left her face temporarily scarred. However, she recovered and returned to acting in Schlußakkord/Festival (Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1960), the Schlagerfilm Davon träumen alle Mädchen/That's What All The Girls Dream About (Thomas Engel, 1961), and Jack und Jenny/Jack and Jenny (Victor Vicas, 1963) with Senta Berger and Ivan Desny.
The following decade, Marion Michael mainly worked for love theatre and television. For six years she worked at the Städtischen Bühnen Köln and In 1970 gave birth to a son, Benjamin, allegedly fathered by an American director, with whom she lived in a commune and with whom she also did some street theatre. Afterwards, she suffered severe depression after a short marriage to actor Marcel Werner ended, and retired from acting in 1976. For a while she then worked as a saleswoman. In 1979 she took the unusual step of moving from West to East Germany, where she worked as a synchronisation assistant for TV.
She still occasionally acted in TV-films such as In Hassliebe Lola/In Hate Love Lola (Lothar Lambert, 1995) and Blond bis aufs Blut/Blonde Till Blood (Lothar Lambert, 1997), and in 1996 her life became the topic of a TV musical, Liane (Horst Königstein, 1996). She also played a small role in the production. The film was nominated for the Adolf Grimme award and the Prix Europa 1997.
In her later years, she still remained a well known German film icon and with her second husband, Freimut Patzner, lived in an old house in Oderbruch. In 2007 Marion Michael died of heart failure in a hospital in Gartz an der Oder. It was four days before her 67th birthday. - Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Musician and TV commercial jingle writer Thomas Webster Dawes was born on July 25, 1943 in Albany, New York. He met fellow musician, Don Dannemann, while attending Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Dawes and Donnemann founded the folksy pop-rock group, The Cyrkle, in the mid-60s; the band had a big hit with the extremely bouncy and upbeat song, "Red Rubber Ball", in 1966 and were the opening act for The Beatles for their 1966 concert tour of America. Tom co-composed the score for the tawdry sexploitation feature, The Minx (1969). After The Cyrkle broke up, Dawes went on to produce the albums, "Rock & Roll" and "Energized", for the 70s rock group, Foghat. Moreover, Tom became a hugely successful writer of popular jingles for numerous TV commercials. Besides his famous "plop plop fizz fizz" jingle for Alka-Seltzer, other jingles Dawes either wrote or co-wrote are "Coke Is It!" for Coke-a-Cola, "7-Up, the Uncola" for 7-Up, both "We're American Airlines, Doing What We Do Best" and "Something Special in the Air" for American Airlines, "You, You're the One" for McDonald's, and "Our L'eggs Fit Your Legs" for L'eggs hosiery. He met his wife and frequent collaborator, Ginny Redington, at a jingle writing competition. Dawes retired from the jingle-writing business in 1990. Tom and Ginny penned the book, lyrics and music for the off-Broadway musical, "Talk of the Town", which ran for nearly two years at the Bank Street Theater and was also done as a cabaret show in the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel. In addition, Dawes and Redington wrote the books, "The Bakelite Jewelry Book" and "Victorian Jewelry: Unexplored Treasures". Tom Dawes died at age 64, following a stroke, on October 13, 2007.- Soundtrack
Winston Ford was born on 12 December 1951. Winston died on 13 October 2007 in Colorado, USA.- Andrée de Jongh was born on 30 November 1916 in Schaerbeek, Brussels-Capital, Belgium,. She died on 13 October 2007 in Brussels, Brussels-Capital, Belgium.
- L.M. Singhvi was born on 9 November 1931 in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India. He died on 13 October 2007 in New Delhi, Delhi, India.
- Animation Department
- Art Director
- Production Designer
Gennadiy Novozhilov was born on 26 March 1936 in Moscow, USSR. He was an art director and production designer, known for Sluchay v kvadrate '36-80' (1982), Tsuna da Tsrutsuna (1961) and The Snow Queen (1957). He died on 13 October 2007.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Obaidul Haque was born on 31 October 1911 in Feni, Bengal Presidency, British India [now in Feni, Bangladesh]. He was a writer and director, known for Dukkhe Jader Jibon Gora (1946) and Dui Diganta (1964). He died on 13 October 2007 in Dhaka, Bangladesh.